Contents

On May 28, 1984, Soros signed a contract between the Soros Foundation (New York) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the founding document of the Soros Foundation Budapest.[4] This was followed by several foundations in the region to help countries move away from communism.

Open Society Institute was created in 1993 to support Soros foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In August 2010, it changed its name to Open Society Foundations (OSF) to better reflect its role as a funder for civil society groups around the world.

In 2012, Christopher Stone joined the OSF as the second president. He replaced Aryeh Neier, who served as president from 1993 to 2012.[5] OSF has expanded the activities of the Soros Foundations network to other areas of the world where the transition to democracy is of particular concern.

The Soros Foundations network has nodes[clarification needed] in more than 60 countries, including the United States. OSF projects include the National Security and Human Rights Campaign that opposes detention of unprivileged combatants and the Lindesmith Center and others dealing with drug reform.

According to the 2009 OSF expenditures report,[14]Africa region (outside of South Africa) was the key area of funded activities: about $51,000,000 was spent on civil society support, human rights, education, justice, media, public health, transparency, and other activities there.

Critics on the left have argued that the Open Society Foundations serve to perpetuate institutions which reinforce the existing social order. Nicolas Guilhot, writing in Critical Sociology, connects the Soros charities to the history of capitalist philanthropy maintained by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. Guilhot argues that control over the social sciences by monied interests has depoliticized this field and reinforced a capitalist view of modernization. He argues that despite critiques of malfunctioning free markets, Soros is actually a neoliberal who believes that competitive markets are the best way to organize society.[15] According to this view, the apparent radicalism of Soros' "open society" serves as cover for the capitalist order, the basic rules of which are never actually questioned or "opened".[3]

Critics on the right, such as Glenn Beck, have accused Soros of using his Open Society Foundations to intentionally undermine societies with the intention of establishing a unitary global government. Beck has argued that the Open Society Foundations have too much control over academics and media, and in some countries have obtained political power that qualifies them as "shadow governments".[16][17][18]

^Beck, Glenn (November 10, 2010), "Five Step Plan", Fox News Channel:, The five steps to control. The first one is form a shadow government using humanitarian aid as a cover. Now, is he doing this? Well, let me start with the central George Soros operation, which is OSI. This is his main group. OSI, it is the Open Society Institute.

Miniter, Richard (2011-09-09), "Should George Soros be allowed to buy US foreign policy?", Forbes, Soros, through foundations and his Open Society Institutes, pours some $500 million per year into organizations in the former Soviet world... And Soros gets results. Through strategic donations, Soros helped bring down the communist government in Poland, toppled Serbia’s bloodstained strongman Slobodan Milosevic, and fueled the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia. Soros has also funded opposition parties in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Croatia, Georgia, and Macedonia, helping them into either power or prominence. All of these countries were once Russian allies..